I have a single rack for Halion Sonic (HS3) with a bunch of loaded multis (saves as internal HS3 presets) which in turn are saved as a rack state by same preset (song) name. Most of these use about 4- 5 instruments, consuming fairly low CPU and memory once loaded. I then save a song to call the rack with the associated preset. Example, song1 calls HS3 rack state song1 which uses HS3 preset song1. No issues here stand alone.
I’ve built a set list for the above songs. When I switch between the songs, this can crash C3 when loading the song. HS3 reports an unhandled exception error. (Brad - I sent a bunch of these reports to you).
Aside from diitching HS3, is there a way:
to make switching more stable? perhaps by a way to delay loading of a song by X seconds by using a binding? I’m close, but have not figured out a song binding that just says on Unload, delay X seconds.
a better way to use songs with different HS3 multis that perhaps don’t put such a strain on the plugin?
@stevemarfisi This should work. However, it is better to load everything into a Halion Sonic instance and use Rack State routes to select the timbers you need for a particular song. The same with Kontakt. Let the big samples load and stay loaded, then pick and choose.
That could partially work, but I change the percussion loops on each one, and pads change as well. A multi holds 16 sounds, not enough. (and yes, each part in each multi can stack 4 layers, I could work on stacking there and muting, unmuting those…)
Here’s another thought - each multi, when loaded, does not take more than 1 GB, so what if I had 2 racks - 2 instances of HS3 and moved from HS3-1 to HS3-2 rack between alternate songs? Is one able to preload a rack instance whie another one plays?
I’ve contacted Steinberg multiple times about crashes in HALion and they’ve looked at crash dumps I’ve sent them but then I think basically gave up on it. The only clue I ever got was that it might be to do with previous instances being unloaded. You could try putting a dummy instance of HALion in the background rack to keep at least one instance loaded - but I don’t know if it will help.
Certainly worth trying but don’t know if it will help. Unfortunately at the moment, Cantabile 3 doesn’t allow isolating plugins on the same platform (eg: you can’t jbridge from x64 to x64 like Cantabile 2 could) so you’d need to use the opposite platform.
Add Halion Sonic 3 into a backgroud rack as a placeholder, no presets loaded
Work on consolidating all of my presets into one big multi, and then use mutes within the multi to access diferent sounds. That would provide 16x4 = 64 sounds in various combinations in one multl / one C3 preset…and then mute / unmute, save a preset, repeat, etc. that hopefully stops HS3 from loading, unloading sounds when loading presets.